Duette+ made quite a bit of noise in Dubai this summer. Headlines called it “a project changing Dubai’s creative scene” and “a project building cultural connections” — and for a month, it seemed like everyone had something to say about the cultural clubhouse that took over Public at Dubai Mall.

Artists, designers, musicians, independent brands, runners, collectors and people who simply wanted to see what was happening kept passing through — and, importantly, coming back. But Duette+ didn’t appear out of nowhere. Long before the Dubai Mall takeover, its founders Raha and Fuad had been bringing very different corners of the city together on their own rooftop, while Duette Studio was building a practice around spaces, storytelling and the way people gather.

We sat down with Raha and Fuad to go back to where it all started: from nearly two decades in luxury fashion and retail to launching Duette Studio, creating works like Daoun, The Ephemeral Petunia Garden and Pearl Majlis, and eventually turning their private community into something the whole city could walk into.

— Fuad, Raha, let’s start from the very beginning. What was before Duette Studio? Raha, I read that you started your career “on the shop floor of a luxury retail store”. Can you tell me about that?

Raha: Sure, it was around 18 years ago. I began on the shop floor, working in sales at Ralph Lauren, and later worked with brands including Gucci, Loewe and others within the LVMH world. Working directly with clients gave me a deep understanding of luxury service, human psychology and the importance of brand storytelling.

I enjoyed it, but I had always been drawn to art, creativity and design, so eventually I moved into visual merchandising. That role let me combine creativity with commercial thinking — creating experiences that inspired people while also driving business results. From there, I kept growing, taking on more responsibility, and eventually I was leading visual merchandising and brand management across the region while collaborating closely with our teams in Europe.

Looking back, starting on the shop floor was probably one of the greatest advantages of my career. It gave me a very strong foundation!

Fuad: The funny thing is that our stories are actually very similar. I have to go quite far back. I was doodling for as long as I can remember. I couldn’t sit in school, take notes and focus on what the teacher was saying without drawing something. It was almost a way of storing information in my head: if I drew a flower while we were talking about a subject, the next time I saw that flower, I would remember everything we had been discussing. I didn’t understand it at that age, but it was my way of visualising things. And I’m still the same. I’m a pen-and-paper person. I don’t really like taking notes on an iPad; I need paper in front of me.

At the same time, when I was eight or nine, what I really wanted was to play football. I found freedom in football — playing in the neighbourhood, going to the academy — and for a while I genuinely thought I would become a professional player. School was easy for me, almost too easy. I could put in very little effort and still be among the top three students in the class, so I took that for granted. I thought, “I don’t need to show up; I can go play football and still do well.” What I didn’t understand was that professional football becomes a very different world as you get older. Clubs don’t really take people straight from the street anymore; you need to come through an academy system. By the time I was 18 or 19, I realised I needed to find something else.

From there, I worked across more than 300 luxury brands, including Hugo Boss, Brioni, Zilli and Zadig & Voltaire, before eventually moving into the LVMH portfolio. By then, I was deeply involved in studying customer behaviour: how people move through a space, where they stop, what they touch. You can spend months designing a store expecting customers to turn right, then open it and watch everyone go left. That immediately tells you something about the design. We still apply that way of thinking at Duette Studio today.

I later worked at Chalhoub Group across the LVMH portfolio and other retail concepts, including projects where we were designing entire environments. Those were some of my last major projects before the pandemic. Then Raha and I had this aha moment: we can do this for ourselves.

— What I find interesting is the shift from fashion into what you do now. Why didn’t you stay in the fashion industry?

Fuad: There are two sides to that story. The first is, yes, fashion is glamorous, with all the opportunities, connections, and the lifestyle. But after doing it for so long, you start to realise it isn’t the most important thing in the world. We became curious about film, music, art and everything happening outside fashion. At the same time, corporate work came with creative limitations: brand guidelines, commercial priorities, and often the expectation to simply repeat what had already been done in Europe. We wanted more freedom.

When we started exploring other creative industries, we also saw a gap in how stories were being told here. After years in fashion, things like building a narrative, understanding the customer journey and thinking about every touchpoint felt natural to us. The local work was already strong — designers, artists and brands could absolutely compete internationally — but sometimes the storytelling around it was missing those small nuances global brands had mastered.

We had lived in Dubai for over 20 years and were watching its cultural scene evolve in front of us. We felt we had the experience to help that scene tell its stories on the same level as the work itself.

Raha: Also, visual merchandising itself is very underrated. My department was called visual merchandising, but in reality we were doing architecture, store design, interiors, window displays, pop-ups and studying customer behaviour. So what we do now isn’t actually that far away from what we were doing before.

An architect can create a beautiful space, for example, but might not necessarily think about how people will move through that space or behave inside it. That is where our experience becomes useful. All those years accumulated into what we do at Duette Studio today. It feels natural to us because, in many ways, we’ve already been doing it in this region for years.

— I want to ask you about three works you created: Daoun, The Ephemeral Petunia Garden and Pearl Majlis. They were created at different moments of your life, and they are very different from each other, but you can also clearly see the same people behind all three. How do you see your evolution as artists through these works?

Fuad: Daoun came out of one of the deepest research projects Raha and I had ever done. At the time, we were working for a national project office on research connected not simply to the last 50 years of Emirati culture, but to the people who had lived on this land for thousands of years. We were told initially that the output was a film, although it wasn’t really a film in the traditional sense. It was closer to internal research or guidelines that could eventually be used with the Ministry of Education.

The amazing thing was that we had a letter that could open almost any door for us. Not just institutions — theoretically, we could walk into somebody’s home, show that letter and ask for information.

Raha: We had lived here for over 20 years, and even then we realised how little we knew about the history of the country and its people.

Fuad: Exactly. And we’re not talking about 50 years. We’re talking thousands of years. We researched palm fronds and weaving. We looked at how people created and sourced fresh water. We looked at the people of the sea, the desert and the mountains, all the way through to the formation of the UAE. For around six months, we became completely obsessed with the palm frond.

Raha: It was used for everything. A plate, a house, a door — whatever people needed. It was one of the materials available in nature, and the palm itself fed people and supported everyday life. We became incredibly inspired by that and wanted to reinterpret it in a contemporary way.

Fuad: The actual research project comes with NDAs, and I don’t know whether that material will ever become public. But Daoun was a way of giving something from that research back to people.

It became this colourful, playful inflatable structure inspired by everything we had learned. The artistic question was: how do we take this material and inflate it, literally and conceptually? It became a medium through which we could say, “Duette is ready. From here, more of these stories are coming.”

— And then came The Ephemeral Petunia Garden?

Fuad: Yes, but Petunia actually came out of a completely different idea. We had developed a much larger installation for Dubai Design Week around music and memory, but it was too expensive for us to produce at the time. We didn’t want to wait another year, so on a flight to St. Petersburg, Raha and I started sketching a new concept. By the time we landed, we had a deck ready. That became The Ephemeral Petunia Garden.

I’ve always loved gardening, and I was fascinated by how Dubai Municipality uses petunias across the city. They are inexpensive, appear everywhere for a few months, and then suddenly disappear, replaced by another flower. Most people barely notice the transition, even though landscapers are creating these huge compositions across the city.

We wanted people to notice. So we took something ordinary and made it completely out of proportion — large, colourful and impossible to ignore — while turning it into a sensory experience.

The response went far beyond what we expected. The work was invited to Venice, and we are now hoping to give it an international debut in 2027. It also won Platinum at the London Design Awards, which meant a lot to us because we wanted to know whether the work could resonate outside Dubai. I remember reading the email twice before realising we had actually won.

— And Pearl Majlis actually came out of Petunia too, right?

Fuad: Completely. When we returned from St. Petersburg and started preparing for Dubai Design Week, they gave us what they considered the number-one location — the beginning of the official visitor journey. And at the same time, in front of Dubai Culture’s office.

On day two, somebody from Dubai Culture posted the work on Instagram. Not long afterwards, we got a call saying, “We’re interested in working with you for the upcoming Sikka.” Sikka was already on our list of organisations we wanted to approach. Instead, Petunia created the introduction for us.

That relationship eventually became Pearl Majlis, which ended up being one of the major focal points of Sikka. With Pearl Majlis, we had that mentality of “why not?” We kept pushing every boundary we could.

The location itself was important. We were in Al Shindagha, an area deeply connected to Dubai’s history of pearl trading. And then there was the majlis. Historically, there were many majlises in that area where people could come, sit together, bring their problems and be heard. That culture still exists. There are still majlises connected to the Maktoum family where people can physically come and raise issues.

So the majlis was already at the core of the concept. Then we wanted to bring the history of pre-oil pearl trading into it as another layer. What became interesting was how people actually used the space. Some things we designed. Others we didn’t. We found people praying inside it. We found people having conversations and talks. Later, we added music programming.

The work became more than a sculptural object. It became somewhere people could actually gather. And when we look at Petunia, Pearl Majlis, Daoun and some of our other works, that is probably the common thread: we create spaces where people gather around culture, talk and connect.

— And that idea of gathering seems to lead directly into Duette+. Where did that begin?

Fuad: The interesting thing is that people sometimes ask whether Duette+ is new. It isn’t. We have actually been doing versions of it for around three years. It began with our rooftop.

Raha and I work very long hours, which means we don’t get to see many of our friends. And our friends come from completely different walks of life — people from almost 18 years of corporate life, people we met through Duette Studio, government entities, initiatives we worked with, artists, creatives, old friends. If you put five of those people into the same WhatsApp group, the first thing everybody would send would probably just be a question mark: “Why am I in this group?”

But if you invite those same people onto our rooftop and bring in an artist to perform, suddenly they have two things in common: the music, and the fact that they are in Raha and Fuad’s space. We started doing these rooftop gatherings every winter. We can fit roughly 100 people, and everybody is handpicked. We have done it for a couple of winters back-to-back.

The idea was to create somewhere people could come, belong, connect and talk. And, selfishly, we also created it for ourselves because we simply didn’t have time to see everybody separately. We could dedicate one weekend and suddenly see our whole community.

But another thing happened naturally. Somebody from DCT could come and meet the creative community around us. An artist could speak to a gallery. A gallery could meet a curator. You could have people from fashion brands sitting in the same room, simply listening to music. It was a very free, very safe space. That was the foundation of Duette+.

Taking it into Dubai Mall was about opening that experience up to the public. And also, frankly, it is too hot to do it on our rooftop in summer.

— The programme at the Dubai Mall space was intense. What was most important to you when you were building it?

Fuad: I love this question because from the outside it probably looks insane. You might imagine there are hundreds of people behind the programme, but in reality it’s me, Raha, a few people from the Duette team and several university students who joined us as interns.

The most important thing was never to fill the calendar just for the sake of it. Every part of the programme had to give an artist, a brand or a creative a platform, and create an exchange between communities that normally wouldn’t be in the same room.

Take music. If you simply want to see an artist perform, you can go to the venue where they perform. We wanted people to hear how the album was made, how it was written, what the process looked like. You might discover that the artist’s favourite track is actually the least-listened-to one. Once you know that story, you listen to the music differently — you know who the person is and how they work.

The way people experience the space was also very important. For music, we brought in hi-fi equipment and vinyl. On the first day, I played my Lauryn Hill collection and heard percussion and sounds I had never noticed on Apple Music or Spotify. The furniture worked in the same way: Vitra helped us create a space where people actually wanted to sit and stay.

Then there is running. I run three times a week, so we created the Creative Run Club on Sundays, where artists and people from our community run around Burj Khalifa with us, then come back for coffee, breakfast and music. We called New Balance and simply asked if they could cover breakfast and coffee for around 40 people. They said yes, and even offered shoes.

That is how we think about partners. We call them cultural enablers. They help us do what we were already going to do, rather than take over the idea. If Vitra had said no, we would have taken furniture from our house. If New Balance had said no, we would have bought everyone coffee and croissants ourselves. DUETTE+ would still happen.

So we weren’t programming events. We were programming reasons for people to come back.

— Do you see Duette+ becoming a permanent thing, or is it something that might return temporarily every summer?

Fuad: We have a bit of a predicament. What we’ve been doing on our rooftop for the last few years is very intimate, and it is very ours. There is a certain perception of Dubai — towers, Ferraris, Lamborghinis, all that shine. And I understand where it comes from.

But there is another Dubai that is ours. Our rooftop is almost like the Tiny Desk of Dubai: an artist, a small group of people listening and talking, graffiti around you, and Burj Al Arab in the background. For those of us who grew up here in the early 2000s, when you said the Burj, you meant Burj Al Arab. There are all these extremes in how Dubai is represented, and then there is this huge in-between. We are the in-between. That is our narrative.

Taking Duette+ to Dubai Mall was about opening that up to the public. We had already experimented with it before — around three years ago, we took the same venue for one day and had around 800 people, and later did another event at Museum of the Future with SALT that brought in more than 3,000. But those were only a few hours. Now we’ve had a space open for a month.

What we’ve learned is that people don’t just come, take a picture and leave. They stay, talk, discover a brand, meet an artist, make a friend — and then they come back. We actually track returning visitors through registration, because those people are particularly interesting to us. If you’ve come three times and I still haven’t spoken to you, I want to know who you are.

It proves that Dubai isn’t lacking energy or a creative audience. What we need is more consistent spaces where that energy can stay together. I can’t tell you what the next version will look like — maybe it’s Dubai again, maybe Doha, Riyadh or Abu Dhabi. We’re still figuring that out.

But our goal isn’t to become the biggest event or event space. We’re trying to build something much simpler: a space people want to come back to.